FROM JUDY: I am all but finished listening to the audio version of Maggie Shipstead’s new novel, Astonish Me!!, and just loving it. If you’re into ballet like me, don’t miss this one; and if you’re not, you may want to give it a look anyway as it’s a good yarn, light enough to qualify for a entertaining vacation read but substantial enough to get you thinking hard about achievement and commitment in a tough and competitive world, and no one is immune from that these days.
As a novel, it’s fiction of course, but it’s also a very thinly veiled glimpse of the NYC ballet world of the 1960s — 1990s. Even if you don’t know ballet, you can easily match up people like Mikhail Baryshnikov, George Balanchine, Suzanne Farrell, and many other well known forces that are fleshed out fully in Shipstead’s vast array of colorful characters, real and imagined. Reviewers indicated that the book was filled with totally credible stories of dancers and those involved in making dance — how they work and think and feel — and it certainly is all of that — a really easy spoonfeed of what it takes to achieve or try to achieve perfection, but, it’s also a good story told well with real insight not only into ballet but also into the cause and effect of whatever one chooses to do with life. …
From BETSY: I have read Magggie’s Seating Arrangements, and will look forward to this one! She does paint very colorful characters! I just finished another great new book . It is All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. It is a novel about WWII, and centers on two young people, a blind French girl whose father carefully measures her paths, first in Paris and then in Saint Malo, and constructs models for her to follow, and a German youth who is an orphan and a brilliant radio engineer, and thus one of Hitler’s Youth Corps at a very young age. Doerr’s writing is fabulous, his descriptions unbelievably beautiful…even and especially about war…his similes are magical. I never cease to be amazed at how so many writers that are new to me can come up with such descriptive language. I want to read it again, but …
And from SUE WHEATLEY CARR: Thank you so much for the recommendation of All the Light We Cannot See. Was that a story! I hated to give it up. The characters are still with me and it’s been several days. From some of the grimmest people to the noblest, Doerr paints an incredible picture of life during the war. And makes you wonder…”Where would I have fit in?”
